Re: Ringmark is now open source

On 4/4/12 10:29 AM, "James Graham" <jgraham@opera.com> wrote:

>I think it is clear that we should never test for prefixed things,
>including as an optional pass condition e.g. we shouldn't have tests
>that pass with either a correct implementation of a "foo" CSS property
>or of a "-o-foo" CSS property.
>
>Prefixed things are not supposed to be part of part of the interoperable
>web platform; they are in essence proprietary features.

This isn't true. A feature isn't proprietary because of its prefix but
because it isn't available royalty-free. Prefixes can signal proprietary
features (but there are also lots of proprietary features which aren't
prefixed) as they can signal implementations of features already well into
the standardization process (and thus soon to be RF). It is the latter
ones we are interested in.

>When people use 
>prefixed things in production, they become part of the de-facto platform
>(people can't drop the prefixes without breaking sites), thus causing
>fragmentation. When vendors fix this fragmentation by implementing other
>vendor's prefixes people get upset. None of this is beneficial to the
>platform as a whole.

What's not beneficial to the platform is to keep sucking. Whether we like
it or not using prefixed features today makes it suck less. And developers
are relying on them on a day to day basis.

>If there is some technology that we think out to be part of the
>interoperable platform, but is only available prefixed, we should fix
>that by making vendors implement the unprefixed form. If there is some
>bureaucratic reason they are avoiding this e.g. WG Process issues, we
>should put pressure on the relevant people to fix those issues rather
>than endorse the brokenness.

I argue we should do both in parallel. You said it yourself, prefixed
implementations have become a de-facto standard.

Coremob level 0 is descriptive, it is therefore quite logical for it to
tolerate certain features (which ones exactly is TBD, but that shouldn't
be to difficult to agree upon) being available prefixed-only on some
platforms, as that is a correct description of the current state of the
world.

However, Coremob level 1 aims to be prescriptive rather than descriptive
and will explicitly require features to be available prefix-free.

Input from Coremob members, and especially from developers in the
trenches, would be very valuable information to bring back to the CSS WG
and to the various parties working on improving the W3C process.

Thoughts?

--tobie

Received on Wednesday, 4 April 2012 09:37:30 UTC